It's Naive Of America To Demand Russia Extradite Snowden

Reuters - Yves HermanWhile the White House orders the Kremlin to arrest and extradite Edward Snowden, the 30-year-old government contractor who leaked secrets from the National Security Agency, it seems unlikely that America turn in the leaker if roles were reversed.

"Imagine there is a Russian officer who worked for ... their intelligence agency, or their equivalent of the National Security Agency, and he came to the United States. Would we arrest and return him? Not a chance in Hell," Steven Pifer, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institute, told Business Insider.

Pifer, who served as U.S. Ambassador to the Ukraine from 1998-2000, said that it was a waste of diplomatic capital for the U.S. to repeatedly ask something of the Russians that simply isn't going to happen.

Officials at the White House and State Department have joined politicians from both parties in trying to pressure Russian President Vladimir Putin to hand over Snowden.

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said it would be "deeply troubling" for the Russians to allow Snowden to travel freely from Moscow.

"It is accurate there is not an extradition treaty between Russia and the United States, but there are standards of behavior between sovereign nations," Kerry said.

Sen. John McCain (R-AZ), who sits on the both the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and the Senate Armed Services Committee, had choice words for Putin.

"...recognizing that Putin is exactly what he is: an apparatchik KGB colonel that has no interest in the same values and principles that we hold. And he is acting in a more erratic and anti-Western [manner] all the time," McCain said.

"This is a security issue ... It is hard to understand Russia's response," Cardin said. "We have a very important relationship with Russia ... That remains true today, even though we don't understand why Russia didn't cooperate with us on a matter of homeland security."

Putin said yesterday that Snowden was free to travel and that he had violated no laws in Russia. "Any accusations against Russia are nonsense and rubbish," Putin said.

Pifer said congressmen like McCain and Cardin are being a little bit hypocritical.

"I looked at congressmen on both sides who were calling on the Russians to return Snowden, and I have to ask myself the question, if at Dulles airport here there was a former Russian intelligence officer, I think many of these same congressmen would be rushing to put through legislation to grant him asylum," Pifer said.

Russian-U.S. relations, particularly during the Cold War, include several instances of Russian intelligence and military operatives finding safe haven in the United States.

Including in 1937, when Chief of Soviet Military Intelligence for Western Europe, Walter Krivitsky, defected to Canada. He eventually provided state secrets to the F.B.I. He was found dead in a hotel room in Washington in 1941.

And in 1968, when a major general in the Czechoslovak Army, Jan Šejna, defected to the United States. He worked as a counterintelligence specialist in the Central Intelligence Agency and later in the Defense Intelligence Agency. The Czech government unsuccessfully sought his extradition.